The invention disclosed herein pertains to apparatus for firstly withdrawing from conveyed containers, such as, boxes, cartons, crates, bottles that are of a specified size and shape so as to be acceptable for being filled in a bottle filling line and secondly to remove unacceptable bottles and convey them to a separate destination.
In beverage bottle refilling lines, there must be a presorting of bottle types so that all bottles that are to be filled are of the same size and shape. Customarily, empty bottles are transported in crates or boxes and are removed and fed to a sorting machine that differentiates acceptable bottles from unacceptable bottles using optical detection systems.
As an advancement to this approach, it has been suggested to sort bottles according to certain features concurrently with their being unpacked or removed from the containers so that a special sorting machine is not required. Up to the present, this objective has been met by feeding individual boxes to a sequence of bottle unpacking machines which each unpack or remove only bottles that have one certain feature such as a specified height to distinguish them while other bottles remain in the box or are grasped only by a following bottle removing or unpacking machine. This arrangement is described in German Patent DE 25 34 183 C3. The arrangement has the disadvantage of requiring several unpacking machines that occupy a substantial amount of floor space.